At major intersections throughout Beijing, in newsstands on the crowded shopping streets of Shanghai, and in all of China's hundreds of towns and cities, newspapers, magazines and journals vie for the attention of passersby from those on bikes and fresh off the subway, to pedestrians and commuters caught in peak hour gridlock. The average stall carries dozens of newspapers of all descriptions. There are the local dailies and evening news (though you rarely find the Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily there-most subscriptions go to government offices), weekend broadsheets, and the specialist press with titles like Shanghai Securities News, Soccer, Computer Weekly, Movie and Drama Weekly, China Business, The New Family Press, Shoppers Guide, Democracy and Rule by Law Pictorial, Health Press, and any number of news digests with articles gleaned from the nearly 2,000 papers produced in the People's Republic today. If your Chinese isn't up to speed, there is always the China Daily, a rather stodgy official English-language newspaper; though in hotels and cafes frequented by foreigners you can pick up a copy of one of the edgy semi-official weeklies like the Beijing Scene, run by Anglophone expats.

A typical edition of the Beijing Evening News, the capital's afternoon paper, might contain headlines on the 'breaking news' about the latest political campaign; a major antique smuggling scam; the latest info about a favorite soccer team; a report on a national anti-drug campaign exhibition; a story on exhaust levels of cars fresh off the assembly line; and story about how a local worker saved a drowning child.

The precious print space that is left over is crammed with advertisements for electronic goods, deodorants, computers, a news hotline, and of course a weather forecast. Even the fold between the front and back page is utilized with half-inch slabs of information going down the spine of the paper, movie and theater listings included. Then there are promos for colleges that teach everything from English and accountancy to computing and cooking. The other 15 pages of the paper are similarly packed with hard and soft news, ads and commentaries.

Southern Weekend, produced in the city of Guangzhou near Hong Kong, is one of the most popular weeklies in the country. It advertises its 20-page round-up of news, gossip and investigative journalism with the slogan: "Everything we do is aimed at letting you know even more." Once, not all that long ago, Chinese newspaper editors did everything they could to keep readers from knowing too much. When I first started reading mainland Chinese newspapers in earnest, I was equipped with both the leisure and the obsessive need to acquire the newspaper-analyzing habits of those inured to the official press by a lifetime of exposure. It was the early 1970s, the dying years of the Cultural Revolution, and I was an exchange student studying in Shenyang (formerly Mukden), capital of the northeastern province of Liaoning, hundreds of miles from Beijing. When the newspapers arrived in the morning, the first thing you did was take note of the "HighestDirective" (zuigao zhishi) from Chairman Mao, printed in bold type within a box in the top right-hand corner of the front page of every newspaper. But then there were not that many newspapers to worry about. Since the local press was strictly off-limits to foreigners-as it was believed that regional news could provide the inimical imperialist powers which we represented with state secrets and dangerous information-our reading was generally limited to the People's Daily, the official Communist Party organ, and Guangming Daily, a paper supposedly aimed at the educated.

I had spent time in Beijing and Shanghai, but only in Shenyang did a quizzical Chinese roommate finally induct me into the elusive art of decoding the daily press. For literate people of his generation-he was a former Red Guard who had done a stint in the countryside before being made a cadre and subsequently sent to university-learning to interpret the oracular pronouncements of Mao and read between the lines of the newspapers was not another academic subject, but vital for both political survival and peace of mind.

Soon I too learned the subtle significance of choice of font size and bold and italics, the complex relevance of choice of typefaces (from "Imitation Song" to "Wei Inscription"), the import of vertical versus horizontal typesetting, the endless intimations of headlines as well as the exegesis of cryptic quotations from classical texts. Above all, I gradually acquired a fledgling skill in deciphering photographs; and, mind you, not just the crudely airbrushed now-you-see-it and now-you-don't news pictures that instantly rewrite history.

I had to learn to "read" (I use the term not as a tired post-structuralist buzz word but as a translation of the Chinese verb du) the light and shade of each image in the People's Daily and its local clones. The hieratic significance of who stood where, near or in front of whom, required a trained eye and a mind attuned to the twists and turns of Party Central politics. It was significant, for example, that Mao's wife Jiang Qing appeared in news photographs with her head covered at the state-organized leave-taking of the corpse of the recently-deceased Premier Zhou Enlai in January 1976. To readers it indicated that she regarded the widely-mourned leader with contempt, and it was further proof that she was plotting to overturn his policies. But sometimes you literally had to see through the paper to get the point.

A notorious incident involving the People's Daily in 1966 illustrates the dangers of cheap paper. On page two, after the de rigueur bloated image of Chairman Mao, was a headline that read "Overthrow Imperialism and the Reactionaries in Every Country!" Held up to the light the word "Reactionaries" was branded squarely on the Great Helmsman's forehead. The editor responsible was severely reprimanded for his serious political error. Yet, in the 1960s and1970s, it was the gnomic Highest Directive from the Chairman that warned people which way the political winds were blowing.

These quotations appeared in a privileged position at the top right-hand corner of page one, a spot once reserved for international news stories or headlines, in a box that was known as the baoyan'r, literally 'the eye of the paper.' While hacks and humorists during this past century have staked out the back page of Chinese dailies, the baopigu (or 'paper's bum') for their short casual essays and cultural commentary, the baoyan'r served as a the real focus for a paper, a veritable darkened glass through which to observe the machinations of the engineers of the human soul in Party Central.

Elliptical utterances were issued from on high and were aimed at cajoling and guiding the hearts and minds of the nation. One of my favorites appeared in the press and on mammoth slogan boards in the cities-I recall it set up on a huge billboard, white-on-red, at the main entrance to Fudan University in Shanghai where I studied for a year in 1974-75: "Class struggle is like a net. Cast it wide and all is ensnared (jieji douzheng shi gang, gang ju mu zhang)." A political thought for the day to help comrades engaged in their life-and-death struggle with the recalcitrant and omnipresent bourgeoisie, one that sounded the alarm about the 'latest shifts in class struggle.'

When I first studied in the daily Party press 'capitulationists' (touxiangpai) were the most talked about betes noires. The aged Chairman (then 82 and only one year from death) shepherded the campaign against these shadowy figures who would betray the victories of his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. His directives printed in "the eye of the paper" and peppered throughout editorials and articles enjoined the nation to re-read the 17th-century novel The Water Margin, a tale of a group of rebels eventually betrayed by Song Jiang, a former martial hero who capitulates to the imperial court and then sets about destroying his fellow peasant insurgents.

I too learned what was meant when, on September 4, 1975, the People's Daily published a quotation from Mao Zedong which in turn quoted the early 20th century writer Lu Xun's criticism of the novel. Lu Xun got it right, Mao remarked, for he said: "The Water Margin is quite explicit: because the rebels didn't directly oppose the Emperor, the moment the imperial forces arrive they give in and are pacified. Then they help the Court attack other brigands, rebels who didn't want to accord with 'the way of Heaven.'"

Everyone soon understood Song Jiang to be the code name for Deng Xiaoping, a modern-day capitulationist denounced in the mid-1970s as an Unrepentant Capitalist Roader for introducing educational and industrial reforms to a country becalmed by the squalls of lunatic politics. Deng's support for privatization and economic liberalization in the early 1960s led, during the first years of the Cultural Revolution, to his banishment to the countryside. Brought back to Beijing in 1972 to serve as Mao's lieutenant, now a few years later he was threatening to "reverse the verdict" (fan'an) on his past crimes and return to his heinous bourgeois ways.

And so the second purge of Deng Xiaoping in 1975-76 unfolded in the pages of the nation's press, not at first through direct attacks on his policies, but in oblique references to a classical novel and the treacherous acts of the fictional turncoat Song Jiang. As Mao said: "This was a peasant rebellion that had bad leaders: they capitulated." Everyone knew that capitulation meant reneging on the Cultural Revolution and surrendering to the bourgeoisie. Whispers intimated what was happening in Beijing, but Deng was not denounced by name in the media until his ouster many months later.

For a 20 year-old foreign student this was all a delightfully esoteric and bizarre thrill. While our sibling middle-class hippies jetted off to tune in, turn on, and drop out in exotic climes in North Africa, India and Southeast Asia, we western foreign students in China were playing political and cultural tourists. We could afford the luxury of debating Maoist arcana; though we wanted to believe everything we saw and heard would influence the world revolution, in reality what was really going on hardly impinged on us. Veiled literary references and court intrigue over rice gruel and salted vegetables in the morning appealed to the cultural voyeur in me, but for a population whose political and personal fate hinged on these auguries, reading the daily newspaper was a dispiriting and, more often than not, baffling chore.

Apart from the Highest Directive in the paper's eye, a mote in the medium so to speak, virtually all articles and news items were strewn with quotations from Mao, invariably printed in bold type. Everything from prolix theoretical screeds to statistics on pig-iron production had to be sanctified by a print-bite by Mao or one of the approved socialist worthies: Marx, Engels, Lenin or Stalin. Even when we wrote essays in class about classical Chinese literature, our teachers expected us to quote the Marxist-Leninist classics. Just as devotees of what in mainland China is dubbed 'post-studies' (houxue) today will pay homage to the secular saints of theory whether they be Walter Benjamin, Homi Bhabha or Jacques Deleuze in lengthy prefatory quotes, or tireless cap-doffing as they identify the modish loci classici for their ideas, so everyone made impotent tributes to the Great Proletarian Revolutionaries in Cultural Revolution China.

But just as suddenly as the bold quote became a journalistic standard in the 1960s, it faded from public view. I remember well the precipitate disappearance-first of bold type and then of the ubiquitous Mao quote-in early 1978. (Note: See the Communist Party Department of Propaganda 'Circular on Not Using Bold Type to Print Quotations from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Chairman Mao in Newspapers, Periodicals, Books, and Documents in the Future [23 March 1978],' in Barme, Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996, pp.128-29.) While relatively easy for the authorities to order an end to bold quotes, or to repudiate one style of Cultural Revolution journalism as "fake, overblown and vacuous" (jia da kong), official attempts to transform the mainland print media into a source of useful information, entertainment and even hard news was (and in many cases still is) a slow and arduous process. As in other socialist countries under draconian media control, only in fiction and in the pages of literary journals could a vision of society not completely at odds with people's lived experience be expressed.

Newspapers have literally taken decades to catch up. Today, mainland Chinese news publishing still exists within (sometimes fairly lax) guidelines determined by the Communist Party leadership, and they basically want to hear good news. Indeed, Hu Yaobang, the most enlightened Party General Secretary (who was purged in late 1986) declared that although 20 percent of paper reports could cover negative stories, 80 percent had to be positive and uplifting.

Under Jiang Zemin the percentage may be fluid, but for the moment the heyday of Chinese journalism when bold writers constantly pushed the limits of permissibility is often replaced by a cozy relationship between propagandists and commercial media pragmatists. It is little wonder then that Rupert Murdoch has his gimlet eye set on China. And this is where a new, globalizing pressure for change may come from.

To comply with conditions for entry to the World Trade Organization, China is allowing foreign media conglomerates to expand their businesses on the mainland. Over the past few years local Chinese media corporations have been formed to prepare for the competition, with many of the smaller, special-interest papers that appeared in the early 1990s being closed down or taken over by big brother companies.

As global capital and Chinese socialism get into bed with each other, there is little doubt among my comrades in the Chinese media that these two forces already speak the same language; both long ago learned to whisper sweet nothings into each other's ears.

Geremie R. Barme is an academic, filmmaker and graphomaniac who has published two volumes of essays in Chinese and is the author of In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).